Two magpies in flight

Realism · Colour · Flash

Two magpies are shown in mid-flight against a plain white background, one wings raised and head angled down, the other with wings spread wide and tail trailing. The feathers are rendered in detailed, realistic painted strokes, with dark blue and purple tones and iridescent green highlights on the tail and wing edges. The birds are placed apart in a diagonal composition that leaves generous open space around them.

Realism Bird Wing Feather Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift along, you two, the rain's found the gap in the awning again. Now, you've all heard the rhyme, one for sorrow, two for joy. Old Mrs Fenwick at the eel stall swore by it, and she swore at the magpies too, every morning, while she hosed the fish blood off the slabs.

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Her husband Alf had carried a pair of them home from the tip as chicks, years back, one with a bent left wing. They grew up on the scraps behind the cold store and quarrelled like a married couple. Every dawn the two of them went up over the market roofs, the sound one looping wide, the bent one riding the updraft and shrieking at nothing.

Then one wet March Alf died, and the bent-winged one would not come down. It sat on the guttering above the stall for three days. Mrs Fenwick put out eel heads and cold tea. Nothing. The sound one went up over the roofs every morning, wide and hard, and came back every evening with something in its beak for the gutter.

On the fourth morning the stall was open and the gutter was empty, and the two of them were swinging low over the car park, tails lit green where the sun came through, going round and round as if they'd never heard of sorrow. Mrs Fenwick said that was the joy bit. I've never been sure. Mind your heads on the way out.